Here's an interesting
NY Times article provided by John Gallagher about
William Pohlad, a producer whose financial support was crucial in getting "Brokeback Mountain" made. He is also a producer on Sean Penn's "Into the Wild." Sections that refer to BBM are bolded.
When the Producer Came to TownBy PHILIP WEISS
Published: November 11, 2007
ON ONE OF THOSE DRY SUNNY DAYS that make the West majestic, a couple hundred film lovers gathered in a park in Telluride, Colo., deep in the San Juan Mountains, to hear independent filmmakers talk about making movies.
Julian Schnabel read quotations from the Russian director Andrei Tarkovsky. Todd Haynes related the story of his successful courtship of Bob Dylan for his movie “I’m Not There.” Wayne Wang, a longtime director, told of his years in the Hollywood studio mills. “They have these things called pacing paths,” he said. “They go in and literally take out everything that has nothing to do with the story or characters or even any breathing room.”
Wang’s statement prompted the one true celebrity on the panel to lean into the microphone. “I wanted to share one thought with Wayne and anyone else who wants to make a movie,” Sean Penn said. “When it comes to Hollywood studios, they understand money very well. When they want to cut that frame or one scene or pace something up more than you’d like it to be, you make a very brief call and remind them that a bullet costs just a quarter. Then you hang up.”
The audience roared, and I turned to a tall man with long brown hair and gray sideburns, who was standing about as far as you could get from the stage. “Did he ever say that to you?” I asked him. A quiet, thoughtful Minnesotan, William Pohlad was a producer on Penn’s latest film, “Into the Wild.” He gave a small shake of the head.
Penn says as much himself. “Everything changed when this Medici came into my life,” he told me after a screening of “Into the Wild” in New York a month earlier. “He’s the first producer I’ve ever worked with where I am the one to bring up the money issues.”
Pohlad, the 51-year-old son of one of the richest men in America, looked like a prince in his long black designer jacket, white shirt out at the waist and pointy lace-up boots. In the last three years, he has made a name for himself in Hollywood with his production company, River Road Entertainment, and his willingness to back daring pictures. His breakthrough project began when he read a script on an airplane and told his wife he had finally found a film he was interested in financing. Many others had turned down “Brokeback Mountain” as too risky. But for Pohlad, it fit exactly what he wanted to do: support an ambitious, emotional, challenging film. “He cash-flowed the entire movie and never took a bank loan, and it went well over 10 million,” says Rick Hess, an agent at Creative Artists who served as Pohlad’s cicerone when he first came to Hollywood. “I credit him with being tasteful and shrewd. He’s gone to places other people wouldn’t go.” (Pohlad declines to discuss budgets, but he says he and Universal, which released the film, shared production costs.) Pohlad is among a small group of fabulously wealthy individuals that have come from other businesses to Hollywood in the last few years. They have produced sophisticated yet commercially viable films that probably would not have been made were it left up to the studios. “Good Night, and Good Luck,” “Crash,” “An Inconvenient Truth,” “Syriana,” “Brokeback Mountain,” “Little Miss Sunshine” — all these films were generated by a cottage industry of independent production companies like Pohlad’s River Road, usually in collaboration with a specialty division of the studio system. Among these producers is Jeff Skoll, who made a fortune with eBay and founded a company called Participant Productions to make socially progressive films (“An Inconvenient Truth” was his). Sidney Kimmel made his fortune in the garment industry and has backed urban, edgy dramas like “Talk to Me” and “Alpha Dog.” Bob Yari came out of California real estate; he has financed “The Hoax,” “The Illusionist” and the Oscar-winning “Crash.”
Todd Wagner, one of the founders of Broadcast.com, describes these films as “tweener movies,” ones that are between low-budget and major studio productions and are “made frankly for adults.” Wagner himself joined with Mark Cuban, the owner of the Dallas Mavericks, and formed a film-production company called 2929 Productions. Their breakout venture was “Good Night, and Good Luck.” “The $10-to-40-million tweener movies need love and attention,” he says.
Wagner, Pohlad and the rest have gained a beachhead in Hollywood because the movie business has grown and the studio business has shifted somewhat from a production model to a distribution model. The major studios are increasingly devoted to huge “tent-pole” pictures. Tent poles are artistically conservative — “Spider-Man 3,” “Pirates of the Caribbean” — and typically cost upward of $80 million to make. A flood of outside capital, often from hedge funds seeking higher returns than they can get in conventional markets, has generated production entities, which have bought into slates of big-budget films.
“For the studios, it’s drunk time in Vegas because the hedge money is flowing in,” Wagner says. “There used to be a couple of tent poles a year. Now, it’s crazy. I understand why they do it. It’s the biggest margin and the highest and best use of people. If I ran a studio, I’d do the same thing. It best leverages the infrastructure, and they are really good at that. Spray and pray. Spend, spend, spend. They have got a lot of bodies sitting around.”
Rick Hess of Creative Artists Agency explains it a little differently: “As the studios become bought and subsumed into conglomerates — which all of them have except M.G.M. — there’s been downward pressure from the corporate parent to offload production costs. It is not just a luxury but a necessity to seek outside capital.”
Studios still want to do daring movies, however, for a simple reason: prestige. In the last three years the awards ceremonies have been dominated by movies made for under $30 million. “Actors and directors and writers and producers want to make them,” says Laura Bickford, a producer who has worked with Pohlad. “They have a potential award audience.” All the studios have specialty units for this purpose, like Paramount Vantage, Sony Pictures Classics and Focus Features at Universal, which did “Brokeback Mountain.” Very few of these films pay back their initial investments and the financial results can be ugly. So the major studios have turned to outside capital, in the form of people like Pohlad. Insiders say a typical deal calls for an outsider to pay production costs and the studio to pay for p-and-a (prints and advertising) and distribution. The independent producers often reduce their risk by selling foreign-distribution rights at international film fairs.
Investors like Pohlad want to make money on the movies, but unlike hedge-fund investors, returns aren’t the primary draw. “Our goal is to be the leading provider of entertainment that inspires and compels social change,” says Ricky Strauss, the president of Jeff Skoll’s Participant Productions. “We all work together. One of the great things is that we have projects with Sidney Kimmel, projects with River Road. It feels like these partnerships are a wave of the future, where like-minded creative enthusiasts help bring enlightened product to the screen.”
Laura Bickford says that she was unable to sell a studio on two pet projects, the 2000 hit “Traffic” and “Che,” a biopic of the revolutionary that she is now shooting across Latin America. Outside capital made both movies possible. “The under-30,” she said, referring to films under $30 million, “is having a renaissance.”
HOLLYWOOD PEOPLE describe Bill Pohlad as a throwback, and when I first met him at a bar-cafe in Minneapolis I understood why. He measures his words and is polite and wry without ever being ingratiating. He says, with something of the naïve air of the Little Prince, that he likes his relationships to grow “organically.” When I said he was an even-tempered sort, he agreed, adding, “But many even-tempered people may not be that way deep down.”
Pohlad’s angst would seem to come from his relationship with his charismatic father. Carl Pohlad, now 92, is a self-made man who grew up poor in Iowa during the Depression and through toughness and creativity built a fortune in the banking and later the bottling business. The owner of the Minnesota Twins, Pohlad is listed by Forbes magazine as the fourth-richest owner in sports, at $3.1 billion. Pohlad Sr. was not immune to glamour. As a young man, he knew Tom Mix and Bing Crosby, and as he amassed wealth, Hollywood kept beckoning him to invest. But Carl Pohlad knew better. It was a good way to lose a lot of money in a hurry, and he passed on this lesson to his dashing youngest son.
Bill Pohlad went to his father’s college, Gonzaga, in Spokane, Wash., and fell in love with Formula 1 racing for a while. Then, like his two older brothers, he went to work for the family business out of a sense of duty, doing marketing for Marquette Bancshares. It was the closest you could get to the media business and still call yourself a banker, he says. “Clearly, my dad came from a certain background and a certain time and built what he built from nothing,” Pohlad says. “He never had an opportunity to mess around with how he was feeling, ‘Do I want to do this,’ or, ‘Is this going to be fulfilling.’ So it’s a little harder for a son to come along and want to be in the film business.”
The boy grew up as a movie lover, but when he said he wanted to go into the industry itself, his father warned him that Hollywood was “a crazy business.” The father had good reasons to admonish his son. Prominent men, from Joseph Kennedy to Howard Hughes, had been drawn like moths to the klieg lights and imagined that having made out in businesses elsewhere they could do the same in Hollywood. “
The movie business has been a siren call to unstable high-net-worth egomaniacs to lose a lot of their capital,” says James Schamus, the chief executive of Universal’s Focus Features. “There is a tendency to treat people who come in with it as appendages with a checkbook.” At first Bill Pohlad tried to get into the industry from the Midwest. In the early 1990s, he started a production company in Minneapolis. He developed a local theatrical production into a feature movie called “Old Explorers,” with James Whitmore and José Ferrer. It was a bitter experience. The movie was shown for a time on television, but he lost his family’s and friends’ money. Afterward, he made documentaries and industrial films, including in-flight programming for Northwest Airlines.
Then eight years ago, something clicked. “I changed overnight,” he says. He was being immature as a businessman. If he wanted to be in the film industry, he realized, he should go to Hollywood. His two older brothers, who also work for family businesses, encouraged him.
Pohlad is very deliberate. It took him a few years to make his first deal.
In 2003, he agreed to go into a partnership with Universal. Rick Hess, the agent who helped Pohlad make his way by getting him three projects that ended up turning a profit (“Brokeback,” “A Prairie Home Companion” and a Madonna documentary), says the Minnesotan’s aristocratic soft-spokenness has been an asset in Hollywood. “Very classy,” Hess says. “I met him and immediately his sincerity, his taste and his commitment led me to think he wasn’t a flash in the pan.”
POHLAD SAYS THAT HE HAS NEVER been good at networking, that he’s best one on one. That is one reason he recently hired a new president for River Road in Los Angeles — to do the schmoozing. “My relationship with Sean is more personal,” he says, referring to Penn. “It’s a business relationship but it is a more direct connection than a strictly business thing. It is about trust and mutual respect. In business, you have to act like that’s the case, trust and mutual respect, when it’s not. I’ve never liked that.”
The lush production values of “Into the Wild” reflect Pohlad’s willingness to trust Penn. The movie was set to be filmed in one state, Utah, but as Penn got into the material he wanted to use more of the locations that the real Chris McCandless, whose story is told in the movie, had visited. The ambitious filming locations didn’t swell the budget much, though they had a “reasonably sizable impact,” Pohlad told me. Rumors put the film’s cost at $30 million. Pohlad says that that’s not accurate but that it was “somewhere in that neighborhood.”
Pohlad speaks of the film’s artistic flourishes with awe. In one scene, the loner McCandless, played by Emile Hirsch, meets a wizened folk artist who has built a sprawling adobe spectacle called Salvation Mountain near the Salton Sea in the California desert. The artist, Leonard Knight, is not an actor; he’s the real thing. “I’ve never seen anything in a movie like that,” Pohlad said. “Like reality woven into this dramatic film. It is just so weird. That guy is so genuine, he doesn’t seem to notice the camera.”
Some studios might have wanted to lose that scene, but a studio couldn’t tell Pohlad what to do “because I have skin in the game.” Pohlad winced at the crude Hollywoodism. “That’s the expression,” he said. “Skin in the game means a financial stake.”
The term is embarrassing to Pohlad because he comes to Hollywood not principally as a businessman but as an art lover. And yet Hollywood relates to him as a money guy. Laura Bickford, for instance, describes Pohlad as a “financier.”
Who is a producer? That question has become a sore point for some of the new arrivals. Bob Yari financed “Crash” but did not get a producer credit on the Oscar ballot, and when the film won for best picture in 2006, he sued the Producers Guild of America and the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences to get the credit. Yari lost the suit. In defending the guild’s position, Marshall Herskovitz, now its president, told The New York Times that a producer is “the driving force behind the film from the beginning all the way to the end,” i.e., not someone who merely bankrolls a project others have sweated blood over.
Todd Wagner, of 2929, says you can’t win with Hollywood: “I don’t think that Hollywood’s ever going to change. You’re dancing with elephants; you’ve got to be light on your feet.”
People are drawn to L.A. by glamour, fame and sex, and that creates a lousy environment for business. Wagner, a kinetic, driven man with reddish hair and blue eyes that flash with humor and temper, got into the business after making a fortune in high tech because he wanted to do something that didn’t feel like work. The day I met him in New York, he had come back from Europe, where he was checking out World War I battlefields for a film, and he had just announced a project with Joaquin Phoenix called “Two Lovers.” He is trying to be a producer in the full sense but still live in Dallas.
“Skin in the game doesn’t really mean anything,” Wagner said, and he whipped out a piece of paper to explain. In a typical co-financing deal, he says, an independent like himself or Pohlad will supply the high-risk venture capital, buying the script, remaking it, then green-lighting a production and shooting it. The studio money shows up when everything’s done: marketing and distribution.
“But who gets paid first?” he says. In any other business, the high-risk investor gets paid back first, or if the business fails, is paid the highest percentage of the leavings. In Hollywood the studios get paid back first, for their distribution piece and the p-and-a. “In no other business is that the case,” he said, almost gleefully. “You’re sitting behind all this other money.” And this backward “broken” economy, he says, is why stars and studio executives are overpaid and movies cost so much.
“I don’t think Bill Pohlad was happy with how Universal treated him on ‘Brokeback,’ ” Wagner threw in. “But you should ask him.”
The unflappable Pohlad suggests that Wagner is the one who is unhappy over his own fortunes. “Certainly the studios have a way of operating that can be frustrating in the least and downright unfavorable to partners at worst,” he says. “Todd has had a more difficult experience than we have. To have films up for best picture” — “Good Night, and Good Luck” — “and he doesn’t make any money, that doesn’t seem right to me. Our relationship with Universal has been great.”
He says “Brokeback” has grossed $200 million worldwide in theaters, though he declines to say how much of that he’s seen. Whatever their frustrations, these investors vow that they’re not going away. According to Wagner, Hollywood saw him and Cuban, the Mavericks’ owner, as just two nobodies from Texas, but after almost 10 films, their company is well established. Now he’s building his own distribution system, which he will use if he can’t get the right price from Hollywood studios. Sidney Kimmel has been making movies for more than 20 years and has formed a new international company that is building a film library.
But the studio system is still the main game in town. Bickford may have fought the studios’ indifference to produce “Traffic” and “Che,” but she acknowledges their power over independent film. “All films need the studios’ expertise in marketing and distribution,” she says.
Pohlad is respectful of the studio system, describing it as huge and inflexible, but necessary. “I don’t want to reinvent the industry, but push for an evolution in the way the studios see so-called outside financiers — what I prefer to call ‘partnerships with producers who bring more to the table,’ ” he said. “But I don’t have any illusions. . . . There’s a fair chance that in a few years we could be bitter and walk away grumbling.”
AFTER TELLURIDE, Pohlad and Penn went to the Toronto International Film Festival, and on to Europe. A few years into his Hollywood education, Pohlad is more confident about his role. On “Into the Wild,” he was involved with Penn’s creative decisions, almost always supportively.
However, he is careful not to overstate his importance, and doesn’t claim to have the kind of relationship that James Schamus has with the director Ang Lee — “sort of Ang Lee’s muse,” Pohlad said. Which may explain Pohlad’s emotional distance from Lee’s most recent film, “Lust, Caution,” on which he is a producer. Early on Ang Lee showed him cuts of the film that included a graphic sexual scene late in the movie. Pohlad raised an eyebrow about the decision. “I wasn’t bothered, honestly, by the NC-17 nature of it,” he says. “I wanted to make sure it wasn’t seen as gratuitous. I mean, ‘Last Tango in Paris,’ that’s what the film was about. I questioned having it in the one section.” But it was a fleeting question; “you don’t try to second-guess the filmmaker,” he says. Released three weeks after Telluride, “Into the Wild” received mixed reviews. Critics praised the film’s cinematic beauty and some of the performances but questioned Penn’s approach. Was Chris McCandless a romantic figure, as Penn suggested, or a deluded and hostile adolescent? The question had come up at Telluride and Penn had been defiant, extolling the young man’s all-out commitment to adventure.
When I asked Pohlad about Penn’s choices as a director, Pohlad got his back up. “If you don’t have a strong vision,” he said, “you’re going to get really screwed up. He wasn’t willing to give up, which is great. You don’t want someone who is wavering.”
The producer was talking to me from Rome, where he and Penn were attending the Rome International Film Festival. Throughout the film tour, Pohlad was taking his time reading scripts and considering his next project. “I’m not very good at volume,” he said. Currently he is in a partnership with Skoll’s Participant to put out “Chicago 10,” a documentary about the 1968 Democratic convention, and to produce a documentary about the food industry. In late October, Pohlad announced a deal to make a film with the legendary director Terrence Malick. Pohlad was at a loss to describe it, other than to say it was both “intimate and epic” and Penn would play a supporting role. Pohlad met Malick on “Che,” a movie he later withdrew from, and had heard about “Tree of Life,” as the movie is being called, then. It sounded “out there” and “crazy,” but he read the script and immediately loved it. “Terry’s an amazing guy,” he said. The Hollywood Reporter wrote, “If anyone has the muscle to bring ‘Life’ to the screen, it’s River Road.”
Between his globe-trotting trips, Pohlad tries to make it back to Minnesota, where he has regular lunches with his two brothers. He was in his car one day when a realization hit him: “Growing up in Minnesota, getting into this not that many years ago, it’s surreal. When I started and wasn’t making progress, all these things seemed like pie in the sky. Then to be driving through Minneapolis and have two films at two big screens in the city — wow. Who would have thought this would be happening? Who would have ever thought that?”
Philip Weiss, who has written on many subjects for the magazine, is the author of “American Taboo: A Murder in the Peace Corps.”
